Chester Cricket's New Home (2 page)

So, having discovered that he hadn't yet flown his last flight or chirped his last chirp, Chester Cricket wondered what to do. There was no point in trying to dig his way out. He was buried in stump, surrounded by stump, with at least a foot of crushed stump above him. The only thing to do was wait—and waiting, simply keeping still, especially when you can barely move, as anyone knows who's been forced to do it, is the hardest, most trying task of all. Impossible, even. Horrible! Chester wished he could chirp his shortest song. But his wings, which he used to make his music, were locked.

*   *   *

Was that a twitter from outside the stump?

“Hello!” Chester shouted. “Hey! Hel-
lo!
”

“That you, Chester Cricket?” asked a burbly voice.

“John Robin—?”

“He's alive!” shouted John, and sang a sweet phrase out of sheer happiness. There seemed to be a little murmur of voices, a wave of relief, as if many other folk from the Meadow were gathered around outside the stump, in the rich gold light Chester couldn't see.

“Oh, John”—the cricket heaved a huge sigh of relief himself—“I'm so glad that—”

“Chester, you never will guess what happened!” said John. “There were these two ladies—both plump as quail—and I guess they got tired, because they sat on your stump, and—”

“John—”

“—and then fell right smack into the brook! Can you beat that?”

“No, John, I can't beat that,” said Chester Cricket, as patiently as he could. “But, John, I sort of was wondering—”

“The one in the red blouse went in head first!” John Robin went on merrily. He was one of Chester's really good friends, but being a robin, he was rather birdlike—flighty, in fact—and had a tendency to twitter. “Dorothy said—she was up in the nest—” Dorothy was John Robin's wife. They lived in the same nest together, in the willow tree beside Chester's stump. “—And she said that something like that—falling into the brook head first—could mess up a woman's hair badly.”

“John!”

“But we did have a good laugh! Until we saw that the stump was smashed. And then we wondered—”

“John Robin!
Get me out of here!
”

“Oh,” said John. And then he fell silent. The silence lasted. Too long. “How?”

“Well—well—can't you find a way, John? Who's out there, anyway?”

“Um—there's a gang of beetles”—Chester could almost feel John inspecting the crowd—“and a dragonfly. Oh, and Dorothy's here, too. She flew down. Say hello to Chester, Dorothy.”

“Hello, Chester.”

“Oh dear,” Chester sighed. “Hello, Dorothy. If you both pecked together—”

“Not a chance,” said John Robin jauntily. “That's a lot of stump you're inside of, Chester.”

“I see,” said Chester. “Well, in that case I'll just have to lie here patiently, with my aching wing, and wait until I starve to death, or suffocate, or the rest of the stump collapses on me and squashes me flat. Goodbye, everybody. John—Dorothy. You have all been grand! Give my love to the world.”

There was some muffled but urgent talk outside the stump.

Then John said, “Chester, are you really very worried about being trapped in there?”

“Oh bug!” muttered Chester to himself. “That John sings a lovely song, he does—but he's one dumb robin!” Then right away he was mad at himself, for thinking that such a good friend was dumb. Aloud he said, “I am
very
worried, John! In fact, I can't begin to tell you how concerned I am.”

“We'll think of something,” said John.

Chester Cricket decided that if he waited for John to think, he might very well die of hunger—or old age. So he did a little quick thinking himself.

“John,” he called, “is that dragonfly's name Donald?”

“Is your name Donald?”

“Yiss!”
came a squeaky, raspy, thin voice.

“I know him,” said Chester. “Donald, would you go ask Simon Turtle for help? Perhaps he can chew me out. Would you do that, please, Donald?”

“Yiss!”

There was a skittering of quick wings, which would have been inaudible to anyone who wasn't tuned, as Chester was, to insect things.

“I would have gone, Ches,” John Robin said, and he sounded a little bit hurt.

“Oh no!” said Chester. “I want you to keep me company.”

Simon Turtle had by far the strongest, sturdiest jaws in the Meadow. However, like John, he enjoyed conversation. And if the two of them got to talking, the day, the season, perhaps the year might very well have worn away, with Chester locked inside his stump like an insect frozen forever in stone. (When the cricket lived in New York one summer, he saw such a thing at the Museum of Natural History: an ant trapped in amber. It made him shiver.)

“Chester, are you still in there?” John called, after what seemed to both a very long moment. It seemed long to Chester because he was trapped, and to John because he'd gone almost a minute without saying a word.

“Oh, I'm still here,” the cricket called back. “I won't make a move without letting you know.”

To cheer his friend up, and pass the time, John told Chester all about how his son George—the youngest chick in his and Dorothy's latest batch—how George had flown all the way to East Puddum. That's the neighboring town, East Puddum is, next to Hedley. How George had flown to East Puddum last Wednesday just to test his wings—they were sound as two sails, too, just as sound as two sails! And then how his other son, James—he's the one who had his mother's markings—

“Can you see anybody yet?” chirped Chester plaintively.

“Well,” said John, “that dragonfly's back.”

“Donald? You there—?”

“Yiss!”

“Is Simon Turtle coming?”

“Yiss!”

Chester's wing was hurting more now, and the dark was getting on his nerves. It wasn't the free, starred dark of the night—it was close and cramped and dark, with only enough room left for worry.

He tried to rearrange his legs—just a little shift in position would help—and flexed an antenna, to prove he could. And he
did
wish that Simon Turtle would hurry. But turtles are slow, and Simon was old, and time dragged like an anchor.

TWO

Freedom—Finally!

Around the stump a soft murmur of insects, birds, and all the Meadow folk waiting there rose up like a bubble, excited, and burst.

“Hey, Chester—he's here!” John shouted.

The whole stump shivered a little as slow but methodical claws tugged a heavy weight up its broken side: Simon Turtle, inside his shell. “Got down as fast as I could, Chester.” Puff! “Came down by brook instead of by bank”—puff!—“swimming and rolling most of the way. Thought that'd be quicker.” Puff! Puff!

“Take it easy, Simon,” Chester said. The good old turtle's raspy voice—not pretty but somehow reassuring, with all the unrushed wisdom of age—made the cricket feel almost safe already. “Rest now. Catch your breath. John Robin will tell you what happened.”

“Don Dragonfly has already. Haven't you, Donald?”

“Yiss!”

The dragonfly could speak, if he wished—he once had told Chester about an encounter he had had with a bee—it's just that he was tight and private, the most private soul in the Meadow, in fact.

“I reckon the best place to start is where your front door is. Or was.
Was
this your front door, Chester?”

“I think so, Simon. My head is pointed toward your voice, and just before Lola and May sat down I remember looking out. If I'd been smart, I'd have jumped—brook or not.”

“You keep talking now. You sound pretty close, and I wouldn't want to take your head off by mistake.”

Working now with his claws and now with his formidable black jaws—they came together just like a vise—Simon Turtle started in to work.

“I was wondering,” said Chester, “are you a snapping turtle, Simon? With those big jaws of yours?”

“No, I'm not,” Simon answered. “I mean, naturally I've done some snapping in my time—all turtles have—but nothing professional, you might say.”

The best way to clear the ruined stump, Simon found, was to bite off pieces of wood with his mouth, spit them out, and then brush them away with a claw. The old stump was soft and sticky and dead. It smelled kind of stuffy and tasted queer. “Like a moldy sponge,” Simon said.

“It's my home,” said Chester ruefully. “Or it was.”

After maybe the turtle's third or fourth rest: “Light!” exclaimed Chester. “I can see light!”

Simon took a fresh breath. “Be careful now. And hold still,” he warned. “This is the tricky part.”

Chester shut his eyes and held his breath as Simon's jaws crunched nearer and nearer. “If you'll just—my antennae—be extra special—I feel something—”

“I will be. I will be. There! Got one free. Can you move it?”

“Yes!” Chester raised and dipped, and then swung his antenna around in a circle. “Gosh! What a relief—!” The fresh air—so often it's taken for granted—felt like a silent, faithful friend.

In a minute the cricket's whole head was free. It stuck out of the stump like a little doorknob. He looked around—“Well, hello, everybody!”—and was shocked and a little embarrassed to see all the animals, insects, birds, one turtle, and everyone else who was gathered there. “One cricket, coming up,” he said, and would have blushed, if a cricket could.

Apart from Donald, and John and Dorothy, there was Hank Blue Jay, and Beatrice Pheasant, a rabbit named Robert who got indignant if anyone called him Bob—although most animals wanted to, since Robert Rabbit was hard to say—and quite a few others, too. Emily Chipmunk, a fretful soul, was just hurrying up, saying, “My! my! my! This is awful! Oh dear! This is really awful! Chester—are you all right?”

“I'm fine.” He was free to his first set of shoulders now. “You calm down, Emily.”

It seems that word of Chester's predicament had spread through the Old Meadow like wildfire—the dreaded wildfire which all Meadow dwellers feared. Chester Cricket, despite his size and apart from his fame in New York, was something of a favorite. People looked up to him—or down to him, as the case might be—and respected his judgment. So when news of his danger was whispered through the grass, the trees, or sung through the open air, all gathered to see if they could help—and also, since beasts and people are like that, just out of curiosity.

With a rather grand flourish—a little grander than need be, in fact, but this was his largest audience since he had chirped his songs in New York—Chester Cricket jumped from his imprisonment to the patch of grass beside the brook. “Da
daa!
” he couldn't keep himself from singing, as he flew through the air—but then couldn't keep himself from tripping as he landed off-balance and tumbled into the water himself. “Just like Lola and May,” he laughed, as he scrambled out. “And serves me right for showing off.”

*   *   *

For a minute or two, as Chester accepted congratulations from all his friends on still being alive, he didn't look back at the stump. When he did—“Oh, my
gosh!
”—it teetered above him in much worse condition than he'd ever imagined. One whole side was gone completely. That was where May had sat—the heftier of the two. And the other was a shambles of twisted, broken wood. There was no nice flat top left at all—not even a space for a cricket to perch. It was late in the afternoon by now, and even the sunlight, gold as it was, and sloping in from the radiant west, seemed melancholy at such a sight.